How to stop strange symbols from being read in the beginning of a getline string C++?

I have this function that imports strings from a .txt file, but when I import using getline the very first string shows up with 3 strange symbols attached to the front. Every other string comes out fine.

I don’t know if it’s the file itself, but I tried making a new file and it still reads in the strange symbols.

I tried a similar function with different data from a different .txt file (still strings) and I had no strange symbols at all.

void SavagePlants::importInfo(std::fstream& importFile)
{
    plants = new PlantCare[numPlants];
    int i = 0;

    while (getline(importFile >> std::ws, plants[i].species, '#')) {

        getline(importFile, plants[i].sunlight, '#');
        wrapText(plants[i].sunlight);

        getline(importFile, plants[i].water, '#');
        wrapText(plants[i].water);

        getline(importFile, plants[i].temperature, '#');
        wrapText(plants[i].temperature);

        getline(importFile, plants[i].soil, '#');
        wrapText(plants[i].soil);

        getline(importFile, plants[i].fertilizer, '#');
        wrapText(plants[i].fertilizer);

        getline(importFile, plants[i].dormancy, '#');
        wrapText(plants[i].dormancy);
        ++i;
    }
}

This is what the output looks like for the first string:

Temperate Sundew

>Solution :

Your text file begins with a UTF-8 BOM (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF). You need to either:

• create your UTF-8 text files without a BOM present.

• just skip past those bytes before reading the rest of the file.

• imbue() a UTF-8 locale into your fstream that knows how to recognize and ignore those bytes for you.